Where’s the Ribbon?

13Aug06

A couple of folks have asked, in blog posts and comments, why Windows Live Writer doesn’t look more like Word 2007 with its ribbon interface. As far as I know, the ribbon interface is exclusive to Office 2007 so far. Not even Vista has any ribbons built in.

If anything, we should be adopting the look of the other Windows Live apps like Messenger and Mail Desktop. And we intend to, we just haven’t gotten around to that yet–we thought Writer was too good of a tool to keep secret until we got everything right.

So where did Writer’s current look come from? Anyone who’s used our last product already knows–we reused a lot of the UI framework that was created for Onfolio. It was the easiest way for us to hit the ground running without looking like a generic Windows Forms application.

Like this:

Related

If what people want is form over functionality, then there are plenty of clients out there with strange user-interfaces that detracts from getting the job done (posting that blog.)

I like the interface just fine, and I think a few decisions were actually quite smart (for example, making the “Post” button a drop down lets WLW expand to different protocols easily as a few blogging systems now support more than the draft, publish duopoly.)

I also like the Panel for Post Properties which easily comes in and hides away when not needed. I do think that the Post Properties panel should be visible by default and hidden manually by the user as most new bloggers will not realise these other options to the post are available.